Is there another reason to do this besides the coolness factor or its size? Most CF cards will not run as fast as a hard drive. Two of them in a raid may work better though. I would love to see a mod guide on this if you pull it off.

I tried to use a a PCMCIA flash drive as a scratch disk in order to boost performance on my Lombard before it got nicked. Didn't work since on the Lombard at least, the scratch disk initialises before the PCMCIA drivers. So no joy there.I wanted to boot from it, but despite my best efforts, I failed to strip Tiger (or it may have been Panther) down to under the 1GB size of the card. I suspect it wouldn't have worked anyway, for the same reason as the scratch disk.CF to IDE or SATA should work fine. SATA will probably give a better speed boost over the HD. RAIDing two of them is only going to help if you have two independent busses for them. You can do this with a PowerBook, but you will lose your optical drive. RAIDing two with an iBook will also lose your optical drive, but won't be any faster than a single card anyway, since both drives are on one bus.MacBooks and MacBook Pros have only one SATA connector, and RAIDing across SATA and ATA is silly.

I just got my 4GB card in the mail last night and I did a disk utility on it, so it is formated to OS X, but I keep getting an I/O error when I try to do a restore from a nice small OS X partition I made on one of my FW drives.

So others might benifit from my mistake and not propagate it I have to sugestions:

1.) Make sure the adapter you muy is a MALE one as opposed to Female2.) You cannot plug the Female on directly into the boad even though it fits, tis possibly caused its failure, it could also be trying to write the OS to the card and formatting it may times.

So a new adapter is on the way and I need to find cheaper smaller cards.

Any suggestions for creating a .dmg of OS X besides disk utility, it was being very grumpy when I had tried that.

I ordered a new male 40pin 2.5" adapter and after frying the old CF card tried the card that came with my Canon XT. Success! it recognizes it as an HD even with the HD icon (strange I thought). I had to bend a pin to make it fit but pretty neat. I have another card coming from newegg.com that is a 2gb, so it should fit a stripped down OS X, we will see I guess. Here are some pics:

A 4 gig card might work better cause the 2 gig flash card is not going to be a full 2 gigs. Just like all hard drives it suffers from the same genius which plauges all writable media. It won't be a full 2 gigs. You might not even be able to fit osx on there at least maybe not Tiger. Even if you were able to it might choke with a swapfile. I say this cause my 2 gig Nano is only 1.7 gigs. I had a good install of Tiger running on my G4 Cube with only a 4 gig hdd, that would give a decent bit for the swapfile too.

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